Be Wary of Phishing & Other Scams ...

LOL! Joke of the year!

The point is to steal credit card info from premium accounts, not to use the chess.com premium accounts...

Agreed!

My grandfather, sundog636, thinks someone hacked into his account. they deleted some of his trophies and messed his game up.

Hillarious! Should wrote "stuff" at the end. :)

I'm getting such messages in junk mail. :)

Why would they want us to change our password

There is a reason for scams to be designed like that. They make scammees self select for gullibility.

http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/167719/whyfromnigeria.pdf

Oh, didn't know there were a serious paper on this ! I had read some economist's blog that talks about basically the same, but he did not give any source (link, in French).

===what follows can be viewed as a human-readable summary of both links===

Sending scam email is relatively easy, but exploiting the answers is not. Not only you will need to answer back a couple of mails before the mark gives his bank's account usually, but also you have afterwards to find the good bank and the way to use the details (it could be in a language you do nto speak), etc., and above all some of the people will realize you are a crook after a couple of mails, meaning that you have just lost your time. Even worse, some of them will pretend to continue to cooperate but give false information (see for example this site, which organizes "scambaiting").

So basically, each person that answer your original email is going to cost you something to treat the data, but without giving you any guarantee to get any money at the end.

Making obvious spelling mistakes, poor English, etc. keeps off the "dumb-but-not-too-much" targets who are very likely to cost you a lot to treat for minimal gain. The "very dumb" that answer even a poorly written email are less prone to give you false indications or such stuff, hence making them more profitable to treat.

Excellent summary.

I have to admit that I find scambaiting tempting. If everyone did it, scamming of that sort would very rapidly become unprofitable.

Irontiger wrote:

[COMMENT DELETED]

Deleted? :D Nce one, though.

I guess it was not obvious enough. Mods didn't want to take any risk, I can understand them.

I hope that not filling in any contact (or giving inexisting contact domain) would protect me, but well...

I personally love scambaiters. I tried once but the guy did not even answer my first email - I must have done it wrong.

I heard that in the same kind of idea, there was an anti-spam method that just delayed quite a bit the mail transmission, kind of :

-hello, I have a mail for you.

-oh ! Wait, I'm taking my glasses... Oh ! It's an enveloppe, I need my paper-cutter... Do you want to take a coffee ? etc.

(taking the mail at some point though).

The idea being that if all the people in the street (= all mail recipients) do the same to the factor (= the spam server) he will take forever to make his tour, hence making spam on a large scale impossible and reducing the efficiency.

Interesting!  I wondered why they'd use such an obvious scam... but that's why... because it's so well known!  Neat.

Hmm, this was deleted before I had the chance to send my bank account details - now I'm not protected from scams! Where can I send my money to avoid being scammed? I'm always getting scammed, it's really annoying

One person on the site received a message from someone pretending to be staff.  In the homepage inbox message they said that 'we have made changes to your password, please click this link to change it'.   However the link led to an external site.  (thus you're giving your password to an unknown).

The person doing this has been banned from Chess.com, the domain host they registered their site with has been contacted and the site used for phishing (along with his account on that site) have all been terminated. (and I'm guessing any others he may have had with that host).

We sent out the message as a safety warning to members of Chess.com to use caution with their details, and if anyone messages anything remotely suspicious to you (regarding your account here) you are to submit a ticket to support staff on Chess.com for them to investigate.

If anyone tells you on here they are staff, unless they have a staff icon by their username (which does appear on inbox messagse), do not believe them - report them!

So this means that Nobody can fake a Chess.com Staff icon ?

I'm not saying it isn't possible as I really don't want anyone losing their account over seeing it as a challenge. Its quite simple and easy to check if the person who says they are staff really are though just by looking at this page

http://www.chess.com/article/view/about-chesscom

我也觉得

总怕别人盗号

What would they gain? I mean if you are poorer it doesn't mean they are richer